Although European
artists initially struggled to balance industrial designs against the
craft movement, machine art thrived in the United States from the start
because it capitalized on a defining American characteristic: modernity,
at least in the sense of forward movement and technological achievement.
Lacking an ancient or classic cultural tradition, America relied on its
strongest asset, progress, especially technological progress, to make
a mark on the world cultural stage. During the industrial revolution,
manufacturers allowed the machine to dictate design, producing unappealing,
albeit highly useful, products. Soon after, Victorians employed machines
to mimic excessively decorative hand-made products. However, shortly after
the turn of the twentieth century, artists who recognized the potential
of the machine to create attractive consumables began infiltrating the
ranks of manufacturing companies and designing machine made products with
a beauty and eloquence all their own. The emerging machine art replaced
unnecessary embellishment with streamlined utility and held fast to the
belief that form followed function. By the 1920s, this band of designers
altered the meaning of American progress, so that the end was no longer
the machine but the beautiful machine. Compare, for example, the 1891
cast-iron stove created by the Portsmouth Stove and Range Company with
Norman Bel Geddes' 1932 gas cooker designed for the Standard Gas Corporation.
The latter incorporated "the absence of projections or dirt-catching
corners; the broiler elevated to a stoopless position; Bakelite hardware;
enclosed cooking top" (Geddes, 11).

As early as 1929 advertiser
Ernest Elmo Calkins, who strongly argued for the use of modern art in advertising
and marketing, wrote: "In applying art to machines [Americans] are on
our own ground. Machines are native with us, and the effort to beautify them
has created a new field of artistic endeavor, as witness the skyscraper, the
motor car, the phonograph, and the radio" (251). And a number of top
designers evidence Calkins' point.

By
August 1931, Henry Dreyfuss, originally a stage designer, was working as
a consultant to Bell Telephone Laboratories. He had already designed a fountain
pen that had "a distinctive outline and rest[ed] easily in the hand"
and a shaving brush that "changes the usual proportions of the bristles
and handle and provides a firmer grip by making indentations for the fingertips
at the proper place" (Gilbert Seldes 22-23). In 1930, Bell sponsored
a design contest for the look of the future telephone. Although he was one
of ten designers invited to compete for the $1000 prize, he refused, "insisting
on the necessity of working with Bell's engineers and designing 'from the
inside out' " (Heskett 108). The company disagreed--until none of the
submissions proved appropriate. Then Dreyfuss was called in and allowed
to work as he pleased.

Similarly, in 1927, Eastman
Kodak hired graphic artist Walter Darwin Teague to redesign both its cameras
and their packaging. The "Vanity Kodak," produced in a number of
colors, boasted metallic trim and a silk-lined case. In the '30s, Teague's
"Bantam Special" eliminated all unnecessary decoration for more
efficient use: "The horizontal metal strips on the case appear at first
sight solely decorative, but were raised from the moulded body to limit the
surface area over which the lacquer coating had to be spread, thereby reducing
the danger of chipping and cracking" (Heskett 82).

Teague eloquently describes
the role of the industrial designer in Advertising Arts:

He does not so much
create or invent beauty as evoke it. His designs are always latent in the
things he deals with, and it is his job to discover and reveal them. He
approaches an object, a mechanism, a device, with a mind uninfluenced by
its present form and with the kind of imagination which is really a creative
kind of insight. He asks himself, 'What is this thing for? What is it supposed
to do? What is it made of? How is it made?' He turns the answers to these
questions over in his mind, fitting them together, matching one against
another; and if he is a good designer a form will emerge which is a composite
answer to all these questions--the most complete, perfectly balanced, unified
answer he is capable of conceiving. And that form will be beautiful, and
it will be quite obvious to anybody that it is beautiful and right (25).

These examples are not
meant to suggest that designers alone created the revolution in the marketing
of household goods or in the acceptance of those same goods as objects of
art. Since the early '20s, the American public had been slowly and unconsciously
internalizing principles of good taste. "The commercial artist is extinct,"
claimed Calkins. "He has disappeared. The men who produce advertising
art are the men represented in the art exhibitions. There is no longer any
distinction, and no stigma attaches to art used for business" (21). The
situation changed the terms of American advertising and, in the process, attitudes
toward art.